2017-18: The Culture and Politics of Resentment

Resentment is a powerful emotion for expressing culture and politics. Experiences and memories of humiliation, oppression, and marginalization have stimulated emotions of resentment, and produced compelling demands for political inclusion and justice around the world. Alternatively, rage against what is seen as the “tyranny of the minority,” inequality, the corruption and aloofness of elites, the “foreign,” and the illegitimate have generated powerful populist upsurges against the perceived enemies of a homogeneous body of “the people.” The goal of the 2017-18 Fung Global Fellows cohort will be to explore the full range of phenomena involved in the culture and politics of resentment, the conditions that produce such sentiments, and the projects they advance. We invite applications from scholars whose work addresses this topic in any historical period or region of the world and from any disciplinary background in the humanities and social sciences. The 2017-2018 is led by Faculty Director Gyan Prakash.